Linux & SATA

July 17, 2005 3:39 AM

Can I expect problems if I try to install linux on a home-rolled system with only two SATA drives?

Is it smarter to get a regular ATA for the system and use the SATA for storage maybe?

posted by RavinDave to computers & internet (6 comments total)

It shouldn't be, just make sure whichever distro you use has default support for your SATA chipset in the installation kernel.
posted by cmonkey at 7:03 AM on July 17, 2005

Nope, some distributions may not include drivers for SATA in their base kernel image, but they should be easy to load from a driver disk. I've got a system with just a SATA disk and installed debian doing just that a year ago.
posted by fvw at 7:04 AM on July 17, 2005

Also, if the distro is 2.6 based, you probably won't even need to worry about the chipset support.
posted by cmonkey at 7:04 AM on July 17, 2005

I installed Ubuntu 5.04 on a 1-SATA no-IDE system with no problem.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 11:28 AM on July 17, 2005

I have a SATA and an IDE drive, and I've had absolutely no problem installing any OS in terms of disk support (this includes BSDs, linuxes, Solaris, QNX, etc).
posted by devilsbrigade at 2:08 PM on July 17, 2005

The short answer is no problem at all, particularly if you're using a distro complete with its own installer, and aren't migrating an existing install.

However, if you're going to be futzing with your own kernel, just remember that SATA support is handled by libata which is under the SCSI configuration menu, not the IDE configuration menu (don't ask). This means your hard drives will be sd[ab] (not hd[abcd]).

Be particularly careful if using an older kernel. On some of them, your hard drive will show up as hd[abcd]. This is particularly nasty as your disks can have different mappings depending on the kernel version you boot. Avoid old kernels for this reason (if you need yet another).
posted by blender at 5:12 PM on July 17, 2005